Combinational Game Theory

A game, in its simplest terms, is a list of possible "moves" that two players, called left and right, can make. Every move is in fact, another game, such that each game can be considered a single state that the game can exist in.

Combinatorial game theory (CGT) is a mathematical theory that only studies two-player games which have a position which the players take turns changing in defined ways or moves to achieve a defined winning condition. CGT does not study games of chance (like poker), but restricts itself to games whose position is public to both players, and in which the set of available moves is also public. CGT principles can be applied to games like chess, checkers, Go, Hex, and Connect6 but these games are mostly too complicated to allow complete analysis (although the theory has had some recent successes in analyzing Go endgames).

Applying CGT to a position attempts to determine the optimum sequence of moves for both players until the game ends, and by doing so discover the optimum move in any position. In practice, this process is tortuously difficult unless the game is very simple.

CGT should not be confused with another mathematical theory, traditionally called game theory, used in the theory of economic competition and cooperation. Game theory includes games of chance, games of imperfect knowledge and games in which players move simultaneously.

The bible of combinatorial game theory is Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, by E. R. Berlekamp, J. H. Conway, and R. K. Guy; the mathematical foundations of the field are provided by Conway's earlier book On Numbers and Games.

and, believe me CGT is never complete with so much stuff around to know about.

some great links:

Combinatorial Game Theory
Introductory combinatorial game theory

Google: Champions Of Innovation

Google has added one more fantastic feature to its search queries. A Link to the Stock quote of the searched company in the first search result.



This is going to add lot more value to it.
Although this was available with Yahoo Search Engine, but I feel there interface is not so good, because it leads you to a different page with all data stuffed in a single page.

Googlers score in
1. Easy integration of Stock prices in the same web page
2. Refreshing the same in every 15 minutes.
3. Its simple not cluttered with all bits n pieces.
4. Graph representing the stock index in last 24 hrs.
5. Than finally a link which gives detailed information about the stock.

Keep tracking Google , some more rabbits may come out of Hat!

How Googling a.k.a Google works?

It takes 8 not so simple steps to Google to find millions of results in fraction of a Second.
Lets’ find out what are they-




A peep inside Google’s Web
Google searches harness one of the world’s most powerful computers. A search, which typically takes less than half a second, is the result of a complex journey that typically makes at least two stops, often thousands of miles apart.

Googlebots
Google creates its own version of the Internet, using automated programs called Googlebots, which crawl the web in search of new information. Web sites known to be important and frequently modified are scanned every minutes; sites less frequently updated may be scanned every few weeks

Feeders
Googlebots feed key information from a Web page to Google’s central network: URL, full text of the page, references to images and other embedded files and specific information the site owner creates about the page, called metadata.

Central Network
At the central network, the information is indexed; every word that could be used in a search query is listed along with information referencing Web sites where the word can be found. The index is broken into ‘shards’ and sent to data centers - facilities made up of thousands of servers wired around the world; because centers may have slightly different versions of the index, depending on when they received the last update, users in different places may get slightly different results for the same search.

Searching and ranking
When people search Google, they are asking the company to find every instance of the term in its index and rank the corresponding documents by their relevance. This is how it happens, stage by stage. The user types a search query; the typical query is two to three words, which can make finding the most relevant results challenging; roughly one in 10 queries are miss-spelt.

Locate It
Before Google provides any information, it identifies the searcher’s location through his or her Internet Protocol (IP) address. The IP helps speed up the search by sending the request to the nearest data center and allows Google to identify geographically appropriate ads.

Snippets
The query is sent to the central network, then redirected to the nearest data center. At the datacenter, the search term is run through the index; matching terms are sent back to the central network, then to the user with a summary of the Web page, called snippet.

The Secret Sauce
Google determines which web sites are the most relevant to a search term by using its ‘secret sauce’ a formula that weighs more than 200 measurements, such as the number of times the search appears on a Web page, the number of visitors to the page and the Page Rank - the number of sites linking to the page and the popularity of those sites.

Breakthrough in Chip Design : the "Airgap"

Taking clue from the nature scientists at IBM labs have proven that the electrical signals on the chips can flow 35 percent faster, or the chips can consume 15 percent less energy compared to the most advanced chips using conventional techniques.

The natural pattern-creating process that forms seashells, snowflakes, and enamel on teeth has been harnessed by IBM to form trillions of holes to create insulating vacuums around the miles of nano-scale wires packed next to each other inside each computer chip.


Using a "self assembly" nanotechnology IBM has created a vacuum between the miles of wire inside a Power Architecture microprocessor reducing unwanted capacitance and improving both performance and power efficiency.

Thus placing this new airgap technique is number ten on IBM's newly released 10 Chip Breakthroughs in 10 Years list.

The airgap

In a nutshell, IBM's "airgap" technique coats the copper wires inside a processor with an insulator that's superior to the glass that's typically used. That insulator is a vacuum, or "air" essentially. Reducing the dielectric constant of the insulation around each wire reduces the capacitance that arises when current flows through wires that are close to each other, capacitance that acts as a drag on the current flowing in the wires. This stray capacitance means that more power has to be pushed through the wires, and more power means more heat and/or slower clock speeds.

The amount of capacitance between two wires gets worse as they get closer together if the dielectric constant of the material between them isn't decreased to compensate. So as feature sizes shrink, these growing capacitances have been eating up some of the power and clockspeed gains that could potentially be derived from the finer process geometries. A number of researchers have been working on using a vacuum as a wire insulator in order to rein in capacitances as feature sizes shrink, but IBM is the first to announce that such a technology will be ready for mass production at the 32nm node.

IBM claims that their tests show that either a 15 percent power reduction or a 35 percent boost in the speed of the current in the wires is achievable with the new technique. This is definitely going to help IBM and its process technology licensees like AMD at 32nm, but as with all things in the realm of processor technology, real-world performance depends on a whole lot more than how fast the current goes through the wires. Another way of putting this would be to say that the performance increase that one generation of processors affords over the previous generation is the sum of many small tweaks, tricks, and techniques at all levels—process, microarchitecture, and ISA in some cases—each of which adds a few percent here and a few percent there to the grand total. The airgap is one of these tricks that's going to add a few points the 32nm products that use it.

One of the most important features of the new airgap technique is that it's easily integrated with standard CMOS fabrication techniques. This means that IBM won't have to overhaul its entire process to make the new technique work.

As for how the technique works, it appears that IBM replaces the masking and light etching stages of the fabrication process with a nanoscale self-assembly stage. This stage involves embedding the chip's copper wiring in a carbon silicate (glass) insulator material, and then coating it with a new polymer material. The polymer is then baked so that a mesh of very tiny, regularly spaced holes is formed in it. After the holes are formed, the glass is removed to leave a gap on either side of the wire.

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